Modern Library Top 100 Non-Fiction Books of the 20th Century (58)

I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong
Hills. The equator runs across these highlands, a
hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at
an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time
you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun,
but the early mornings and evenings were limpid
and restful, and the nights were cold.
-Isak Dinesen, Out
of Africa

Why is it do you suppose, that these should be among the most moving
and recognizable opening lines in all of literature? I used to think
that they lingered in memory just because of the creepy way that Meryl
Streep recites them in the
movie. But even contemporaneous reviews often mentioned their
haunting quality. I think that ultimately it must be because the
book is so specifically about a unique time and place and that this introduction
serves to place us there so completely. That after all is what makes
the book special, the way that it captures, in minute detail, the brief
moment of Colonial splendor in Kenya and turns it into something out of
a fairy tale.

Of course, we now know that Isak Dinesen's version of this colony is
in fact more mythical than factual--that she was actually Karen Blixen,
that in reality the husband who is virtually nonexistent in these pages
gave her venereal disease, that Hatton-Finch was not just a buddy but a
lover and that the natives, for all her seeming love and respect for them,
probably would not appreciate the way she continually compares them to
animals. And it is because we know all these things that a book which
when it was written seemed merely elegiac now seems truly deluded.
But despite all that we've learned in the intervening years, it remains,
on it's own terms, a beautiful and heartrending book. I actually
prefer Beryl Markham's similar but superior African memoir West With
the Night (1941) (read Orrin's
review, Grade: A+), butthis one's well
worth reading too.